One thing to keep in mind about children, which seems to get lost on a lot of authors, is that they're people just like adults. Their personalities can be just about anything, but they often have less empathy and the like because they simply haven't learnt that much yet.
The issue that I take with a lot of fantasy these days is not so much that adults are evil and children are good (though there is also that--see Twilight, for example, where Bella wangsts about getting older than nineteen) but that the protagonist and others as special as they are are the only ones that really matter. Again, to use Twilight as an example, only Bella and her vampire and werewolf friends matter; the ordinary people around her can be killed without due comment. Which seems like a profoundly childish view, if you think about it--kind of like how little babies think they and their mothers are the only people in the world.
I guess what I'm getting at is, even putting aside the idea that adults=bad and children=good there seems to be a glorification of childishness, not just in bad fantasy but in bad writing in general. If you look at 50 Shades of Grey, for example, it's really about a woman who acts like a twelve-year-old and a man who's abusive because he throws childish tantrums whenever he doesn't get his way.
...Yeah, I may have to follow up on this train of thought in a proper post.
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The issue that I take with a lot of fantasy these days is not so much that adults are evil and children are good (though there is also that--see Twilight, for example, where Bella wangsts about getting older than nineteen) but that the protagonist and others as special as they are are the only ones that really matter. Again, to use Twilight as an example, only Bella and her vampire and werewolf friends matter; the ordinary people around her can be killed without due comment. Which seems like a profoundly childish view, if you think about it--kind of like how little babies think they and their mothers are the only people in the world.
I guess what I'm getting at is, even putting aside the idea that adults=bad and children=good there seems to be a glorification of childishness, not just in bad fantasy but in bad writing in general. If you look at 50 Shades of Grey, for example, it's really about a woman who acts like a twelve-year-old and a man who's abusive because he throws childish tantrums whenever he doesn't get his way.
...Yeah, I may have to follow up on this train of thought in a proper post.